Page 95 of Sweet Nightmare

Electricity slams through me as my hand slips right through her. I scream as I go down, face-first. Her hand finally—finally—slips off my wrist as she disappears. And thankfully, so do all the other flickers as well, vanishing as quickly as they came.

I’m left on the soaking wet ground, huddled in a ball and trying to drag a much-needed breath in my lungs as the rain continues to pummel me.

“Clementine!” All of a sudden, Ms. Aguilar is crouched down next to me, her ridiculous yellow-green umbrella shielding me from the storm. “What happened? Are you all right?”

I push to a sitting position, my body still trying to assimilate to the sudden lack of gut-wrenching pain. “I’m okay,” I tell her after a moment, but even as I say the words, I’m not sure they’re true. Because that was terrifying.

My mind is still racing, my heart beating way too fast. And my whole body is shaking—whether from fear or because I just had a shit-ton of electricity pumped through it, I don’t know.

Part of me wants to check for burns, because I can’t imagine feeling all that and not having some physical sign of it.

I blow out a long breath and try to get my shit together. But it’s hard because I am really, really freaked out right now.

The ghosts have never been like this before, so something has to have changed. I just need to figure out what. Because I’m not a fan of the flickering, and I’m damn sure not a fan of having thousands of volts of electricity pumped through my body.

But the only thing I can think of that’s different is the storm. Could it be the lightning that comes with it that changes the ghosts into flickers? That might account for that sudden, awful influx of electricity I felt when she touched me.

But there’ve been storms on the island before. None as big as this, true, but they’ve had a bunch of lightning and thunder, and this has never happened.

So what’s so different this time? And how can I fix it before I end up electrocuted for real next time?

“You don’t look fine,” she says, pulling on my arm in an attempt to help me up.

But pixies aren’t exactly known for their strength, so I push to my feet under my own power. If my legs still feel a little wobbly under me, she doesn’t need to know. No one does.

Besides, how could they not be shaky? That was a hell of a lot of electricity that just poured through me.

“I thought we told you to get to your room,” Danson growls, and I realize for the first time that he’s standing behind me.

“Sorry,” I tell him. “I’m on my way.”

“We’ll walk you,” he says, and I don’t know if that’s because he doesn’t trust me or because I look as bad as I feel. No one wants the headmaster’s daughter to drop dead on their watch, after all…

Or maybe it’s because he doesn’t trust the Jean-Jerks not to come looking for me again. To be fair, neither do I.

Whatever the reason is, he and Ms. Aguilar walk me to my cottage, and she holds her umbrella over my head the whole time. I’m already soaking wet from the first half of my walk, but it’s still a nice gesture, one I thank her for when we finally get to our cottage.

“Don’t be silly!” she exclaims with a wave of her free hand. “I can’t let my fellow poetry lover catch a cold, now, can I?”

“Get inside,” Danson orders gruffly.

I nod, but when I turn to do as he says, he stops me with a giant hand on my shoulder. “You really shouldn’t be out here alone again tonight.”

I don’t know if he means for the words to sound ominous, but they definitely do. I want to put it down to the fact that he uses his very serious voice, but the truth is it’s more than that. He looks like he’s expecting trouble. Even before he turns to Ms. Aguilar and says, “Let’s go, Poppy. Something tells me, storm or no storm, these kids are going to make sure we have a long, long night.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

DOOM-ATORY

I watch them go until the dark of the storm obscures them from view.

They make a ridiculous pair—Danson, so huge and serious and tough alongside Aguilar, so tiny and happy and a complete pushover. But, somehow, I get how they’re friends.

After they disappear, I finally head inside. Eva unrolled the tapestry on our living room floor, but it hasn’t changed since the last time I saw it—it’s still filled with manticores playing poker.

Still, I crouch down next to it and just watch it for a while, looking for…I don’t know what. Some clue as to why it changes, maybe. Or a hint of what it’s going to do next.

Eventually, though, exhaustion weighs me down, and I make my way back to the bedroom Eva and I share. She’s got Heartstopper playing on the TV, but when I head in to tell her everything that just happened, she’s already asleep, a chocolate chip cookie still in her hand.

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